Ever since Colonial times, Americans have been bedeviled by high taxes that seem to return little of material value to citizens. Taking a page from Thomas Paine's "Greedy Hand" manifesto, Amity Shlaes has written a provocative and fascinating book exposing the inequities of our present tax system, and offers concrete, coherent solutions to simplify our lives. Today, taxes make up more than a third of our economy, the highest level in peacetime history. We truly live in the land Paine foresaw when he warned of government "thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry." This book is a cultural examination of the way taxes influence our behavior, and how they force us into an arbitrary system that punishes families and individual enterprise. Shlaes shows how so-called tax breaks do little to help families and how married women are unfairly taxed more. She uncovers the problems that engage and enrage us, proving that Social Security issues and school inadequacies are at heart tax problems. And she charts a course out of the madness of tax oppression, offering a number of solutions that will give each of us a fairer, simpler system. With compassion for Americans and their dreams, Shlaes makes the best case yet for rethinking our tax code.
Amity Shlaes is completing two books, a biography of Calvin Coolidge, "Coolidge", for HarperCollins, and FORGOTTEN MAN GRAPHIC, a graphic version of "The Forgotten Man" for adults. The artist is Paul Rivoche.
Miss Shlaes is a senior fellow in economic history at the Council on Foreign Relations. Bloomberg carries her syndicated column. Readers know her work also from the Financial Times, where she was senior columnist for half a decade 2000-2005), and the Wall Street Journal, where she edited op eds and served on the editorial board, eventually concentrating on economics(1983-2000). Over the years Miss Shlaes has appeared in a variety of other publications, from Commentary Magazine, the American, and Foreign Affairs to the New Republic, Forbes, Fortune, the (London) Spectator, the American Spectator, Cosmopolitan and the New Yorker. She is also a commentator for "Marketplace," the radio show.
Miss Shlaes started out her career in the foreign policy area, writing about East Europe. Her first book, "Germany: The Empire Within" appeared in 1991 (Farrar, Straus and Jonathan Cape). In the later 1990s, while at the WSJ, Miss Shlaes penned a national bestseller on the tax code, "The Greedy Hand" (Random House). In 2002 Miss Shlaes was J.P. Morgan fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, where she undertook work on her current book, "The Forgotten Man." "The Forgotten Man" first appeared in 2007 (HarperCollins/Jonathan Cape). The paperback edition (HarperPerennial) contains a timeline and other material for teaching. Both editions are national bestsellers. In December, 2008, the Japanese edition of TFM was published by NTT. TFM appeared in Chinese in 2009. In 2011, it appeared in Italian and German.
In 2008, 2009 and 2010, Miss Shlaes taught "The Forgotten Man" at New York University's Stern School of Business. She is the recipient of the Frederic Bastiat Prize of the International Policy Network, the Warren Brookes Prize (2008) of the American Legislative Exchange Council, as well as a two-time finalist for the Loeb Prize (Anderson School/UCLA). In 2009, "The Forgotten Man" won the Manhattan Institute's Hayek Prize.
Miss Shlaes is a magna cum laude graduate of Yale College and did graduate work at the Freie Universitaet Berlin on a DAAD fellowship.
